‘Where Is My Todd Blanche?’

Why Trump's personal attorney isn’t fit for office.

Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture

By Christopher Swartz

As Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Donald Trump took shape in 2017, the president lamented that then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions wasn’t stepping up to prevent the inquiry. “Where is my Roy Cohn?” the President complained. He might as well have said, “Where is my Todd Blanche?”

Today, the Senate Judiciary Committee will begin deliberations on whether to approve Donald Trump’s nomination of Todd Blanche as the 88th Attorney General of the United States. This should be an easy decision: no.

Since the Judiciary Act was passed in 1789, there have been 87 Attorneys General. Each one took an oath of office. Today, that oath requires nominees to swear that they will “bear true faith and allegiance” to the Constitution and to “well and faithfully” execute their duties.

Since his appointment as deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche has undermined that oath time and again, all in service of one man: Donald Trump. And it has had devastating effects on the Department of Justice.

Under Blanche’s leadership, more than 16,000 DOJ employees have left office, many summarily terminated, pushed out, or fleeing due to fear of retribution. In his own words, Todd Blanche “cleaned house.”

Blanche was (and continues to be) DOJ’s key man in the Epstein files saga. He was involved in every stage of that process, from initial attempts to sweep the whole thing under the rug, to interviewing Ghislaine Maxwell in prison, to overseeing the Department’s botched response to the Epstein Files Transparency Act that resulted in what has been described as “the single most egregious violation of victim privacy in one day in United States history.”

Blanche was also central to the attempted creation of the President’s $1.776 billion dollar slush fund and was the sole signatory on a one-page addendum to the settlement agreement which gave Trump, his family, and his businesses a global release of all liability associated with past tax audits. In a scathing opinion issued earlier this week, Judge Kathleen William of the Southern District of Florida found that President Trump, Todd Blanche, and the Department of Justice attempted to have “the Court to provide some legitimacy to an agreement to confer immunity to people and entities affiliated with the President and to earmark billions of dollars from American taxpayers to redress grievances not defined in the law.”

Most importantly, during Blanche’s tenure the Department has gone from a beacon of competent, independent, and impartial law enforcement to a political attack dog of the president. Blanche himself launched high-profile investigations into perceived presidential enemies, like James Comey. And under his watch, the Department has brought several cases that lacked probable cause (a bare minimum for bringing a charge) or that failed to adhere to basic prosecutorial requirements. As a result, dozens of courts across the country have determined that the Department of Justice is no longer entitled to a presumption of regularity (read: trustworthiness).

As Democracy Defenders Fund, along with Lawyers Defending American Democracy and 101 bi-partisan retired federal and state judges explained in a recent bar complaint, these actions indicate not only that Todd Blanche lacks the necessary fidelity to the United States, but that he appears to have failed to adhere to his own ethical obligations as a practicing attorney.

That track record should be disqualifying for permanent appointment as attorney general.

Those who would quibble with that assessment need only look to the history books to see what happens when the attorney general violates his oath of office by placing loyalty to the president over allegiance to the Constitution.

In 1969, President Nixon appointed John Mitchell to be his first attorney general. Mitchell used his office to go after political opponents (who he claimed were engaged in “domestic subversion”), even going so far as to wiretap US citizens without a warrant. One of the central figures in the Watergate scandal, Mitchell eventually was convicted of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, perjury. He served 19 months in prison and lost his bar license.

Todd Blanche is the John Mitchell of today.

Yet we are not doomed to watch history repeat itself. We don’t need to hear what Blanche has to say at his confirmation hearing—we’ve already seen what type of attorney general he will be. In John Mitchell’s words, “Watch what we do, not what we say.” And what Todd Blanche has done is clear: he put the personal and political interests of the president before the well-being of the nation. If that isn’t disqualifying, it is unclear what is.

Chris Swartz is Senior Ethics Counsel at Democracy Defenders Action.